


Man At The Right Hand

by BeastOfTheSea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bullying, Dumbledore Bashing, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Lily Bashing (mentioned), M/M, Manipulative!Harry, Marauders Bashing (mentioned), Revenge, Slytherin!Harry, Trope Subversion/Inversion, With A Twist, Wrong Boy-Who-Lived, welcome to the Wrong-BWL genre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-16
Updated: 2014-08-16
Packaged: 2018-02-13 09:31:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2145726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeastOfTheSea/pseuds/BeastOfTheSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Officially, William Potter is the Boy-Who-Lived, the Chosen One of Prophecy. Unofficially, the Light and Dark are both idiots, and deserve what they're soon to get. Especially when the real Chosen One has been right under their noses all along.</p><p>/Not your typical Wrong-Boy-Who-Lived fic.../</p>
            </blockquote>





	Man At The Right Hand

**Author's Note:**

> Just a note: this isn't your typical Wrong Boy-Who-Lived Harry, either. Fair warning for him not being the _nice_ kind of Slytherin...
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** I am not J.K. Rowling, and I do not own the Harry Potter series or any related characters. This fanfiction is purely for entertainment and not in any way for profit.

Harry looked into the mirror and cursed at the bruises and cuts there. Good old William, so ashamed of having a _Slytherin_ brother – never passed up the chance to demonstrate how sorry he was that Harry had ever been born. And practically the entire fucking school cheered him on. Even fellow Slytherins. Bloody lot of kiss-ups. At least some of the Hufflepuffs looked ashamed at the spectacle and tried to break them up.

He started attaching bandages to his face with Sticking Charms and smearing on anti-inflammatory salves. It was all right. He had a solution.

The time would come when William Potter wept broken at his feet.

And his worthless excuses for parents would join him.

* * *

 

Bloody prophecy.

Maybe he'd have actual parents if not for it. Well, Lily and James would always be backstabbers, but he'd know no better. Just as James had considered Pettigrew a friend before the breaking of the Fidelius, so that alternate Harry might have considered his parents kind and caring guardians. Or even if William hadn't existed…

He'd stopped seriously wishing he'd been an only child by the time he was nine. He also stopped seriously wishing for silly nonsense in general at that age. All that mattered was _actual_ power, not childish dreams.

For instance – being the Chosen One. He knew damnably well he wasn't the Chosen One – William would have paid for his cruelty long before now if he were. Despite Harry's dearest wishes and constant practice, he was only an average wizard. And William, stupider though he was, _had_ always been the stronger twin. Dumbledore had diagnosed that correctly.

However, William wasn't the Chosen One either. Harry had no idea how they'd actually survived Halloween 1981, but he knew both the Marauders and Lily were some of the most brilliant wizards of their time – for all that they were also utter shits as human beings. And ones with extremely selective memories at that. He wouldn't have been at all surprised if they'd rigged the house up as a death-trap – _if we go, we_ ALL _go –_ in case Voldemort somehow circumvented the Fidelius, and promptly forgotten about that the moment Dumbledore walked into the rubble and began hailing William as the Boy-Who-Lived. James and Lily both admitted in slurring voices, after he sprinkled some Veritaserum in their late-night Firewhiskeys, that they remembered nothing from the time Voldemort walked in the door to the moment Sirius Ennervated them and began asking what the bloody hell had happened. For all Harry knew, Voldemort had slipped on a banana peel, accidentally cast the Killing Curse on himself, and promptly brought the whole house down by triggering some sort of anti-Unforgivable safeguard. It wasn't as if there were anyone to gainsay that sequence of events.

Harry did, however, know the truth of the prophecy. And he had the future wrapped around his little finger as a result.

It gave him a warm feeling in the pit of his stomach just to think about it.

* * *

"Milord," he said, kneeling on the classroom floor. Clumsy hands hastily helped him up. 

"Merlin, Harry, there's no need for you to address me that way – Good grief, _look at you_. Did William do this to you?" 

Harry sighed and bowed his head, doing his best to look as though he were struggling to hold back tears. It was cheaper than actually forcing some to come out. "You know how it is," he said, sounding as manfully miserable as he could. "Wasn't in public this time, at least." He didn't need to fake his bitter smile. "Jumped me from behind, him and his lot – this one came from Tweedledee and Tweedledum, by the way, not Will." He tapped a large cluster of cuts, vaguely forming a starburst pattern, above his left eyebrow. "They said that if I envied my brother so much, I could have a scar to match. Share a bit in the glory–"

" _For the love of – I'm going to KILL them!_ "

Harry suppressed a smirk as the words exploded out of the other wizard. Nothing would please him more. However… "They're not worth it, Neville," he said, placing a hand on his companion's shoulder. "There's no point in moving yet. Not while Dumbledore and the Dark Lord are still at full power. We're on the ascent, they're on the descent. Let them weaken each other and the Defense Association grow stronger before we make a move."

"Fuck them both," Neville snarled. "Fuck them, and all their supporters. They're no different – they just kiss up to whoever's the most powerful, and they don't care about right and wrong one bit – bunch of lousy bastards–"

Harry felt his pants tighten as the other boy ranted on, and allowed himself to calmly smile. All his plans were within months of coming to fruition, thanks to the Light's incompetence and the Dark's obliviousness – the powers-that-be had only themselves to blame.

After all, anyone could have taken one look at Neville's bursts of accidental magic in Potions class and known he was the exact opposite of a Squib. Only one boy had. Before that, Neville's relatives could have nurtured their ward's obvious talents with plants while patiently waiting for flashier sorts of magic to manifest. They chose instead to try to kill him more persistently than Voldemort had tried to kill William. That they'd never succeeded would have been adequate testimony to Neville's magical abilities, but no, they always chose to put his survival down to " _coincidence_ " – what, and did _strange coincidences_ that constantly saved a child's life need a giant THIS IS MAGIC stamp on them to be recognized as such?

Detached, battered Harry Potter had instinctively recognized signs of neglect and maltreatment in his fellow unfortunate and gravitated to him. It hadn't hurt that William and his fellow _pranksters_ saw nothing in a chubby, awkward boy but target practice. (In retrospect, Harry wondered if Pettigrew's betrayal of his long-time "friends" hadn't been long provoked. He wasn't about to visit the man in Azkaban to ask.) That had provided some common ground as an icebreaker. By the time William lost interest and moved on to fresher victims, the two boys had already cemented a bond.

Once Neville actually received basic magical instruction beyond "get your head held underwater and try not to die", he'd blossomed like one of his Herbology experiments. Harry, who had just intended to remedy Neville's deficits, had watched his rapid development with unease: no young wizard was supposed to shoot that far ahead of the rest of his peers. Even William, trained from an early age as though he was going to save the entire bloody Wizarding World by himself, would have paled in comparison to Neville in no time. So Harry had asked Neville to cut back just a _little_ in class… even if he kept up his progress in private. Just so he didn't attract attention, understand.

The idiot professors had attributed Neville's temporary surge to overcompensation after a long period of near-Squibhood (idiots, dunces, and morons) and blithely accepted his regression to the mean without a moment of critical thought. Meanwhile, Harry had watched Neville's continued development and thought:

_On the subject of "marking"._

_Voldemort is a raging coward._

_It stands to reason that a coward would_ not _face an equal. Not directly, at any rate._

 _Voldemort quite cheerfully strolled into the house at Godric's Hollow, whatever happened next. We were babies. Doesn't matter. With that, he demonstrated, consciously or unconsciously, that he did_ not _consider us equals. Therefore whatever marks we received from him – or from stray spells, or falling rubble – don’t mark either one of us "as his equal". Quite the contrary._

_Now, Dumbledore – Dumbledore he avoids. In the world's eyes, that marks Dumbledore as his equal._

_And what of the boy he never touched?_

By the time fourth year ended, he was sure of it. He was nearly sure by the end of second year, when William had raced down heroically into the Chamber and managed to do nothing beyond get himself turned into yet another Riddle power-battery, while "bumbling" Neville had barged into the bathroom armed with nothing more than Hogwarts' most overused hat and managed to kill both the basilisk _and_ the now-corporeal Horcrux without sustaining any injury worse than a broken arm. But, of course, Dumbledore had put that down to nothing more than dumb luck and Proper Gryffindorship while he congratulated William for _somehow_ weakening Riddle with the purity of his magic.

When William botched his Big Chance to vanquish the Dark Lord, instead _providing part of the ingredients needed to bring him back_ , and emerged blubbering from the maze with a dead Diggory in tow, Harry had taken that once and for all as his confirmation that his brother wasn't the Chosen One. A funny coincidence with wands wasn't _the power the Dark Lord knew not_. Nor was accepting death. Merlin, they could have just thrown every suicidally-depressed teenager in Hogwarts at Voldemort and have him finished off in minutes if that were the case. Or the population of Azkaban. He was sure quite a few of them had " _accepted death_ " several months into their life sentences. Most accounts said the nonstop screaming set in within weeks, after all.

So. William wasn't anything special. Neville was. Both might satisfy the requirements of prophecy, depending upon how one looked at it. (Harry did, too, but he'd given up _secretly being the REAL Boy-Who-Lived_ before his age hit double digits. If he couldn't vanquish William, he wasn't about to vanquish the Dark Lord.) One had successfully vanquished at least a _fragment_ of Tom Riddle Himself. The other had failed repeatedly.

If Dumbledore had just pulled his head out of his arse by the beard… But certain late-night talks with the barman of the Hog's Head had later given Harry reason to believe that Albus Dumbledore had already had his head well-embedded into his rectum by the time he turned eighteen, and had been working it further in ever since. At the time, Harry had given the man the benefit of the doubt and just assumed that _the great Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, defeater of Grindelwald, inventor of the twelve uses of dragon's blood, etc. etc._ had tragically succumbed to senility.

And so under-appreciated, neglected Neville had been solely Harry's to mold and train. When his only friend from first year on spoke, Neville listened. When he was hurt, Neville raged. When he laid out a plan, Neville obeyed.

Not that Harry didn't appreciate Neville for himself. Harry did, really. So passionate, so loyal, so powerful, so modest, so insecure, so damaged… if he wasn't every Slytherin's wet dream, the entire House needed to be re-Sorted.

Harry didn't feel guilty over the thought. Someone with as much potential and as much naïveté as Neville was going to be taken advantage of by _someone_. He considered it the best thing for all involved that it had been someone like him, who wanted Neville to achieve his full potential, rather than a twinkling arse like Dumbledore. Man could probably manage to get his trump card stuck on the mother of all camping trips while Voldemort took over England. No, that was too harsh even on Dumbledore. Not by much. Still – far, _far_ better that Neville should be _his_ man rather than Dumbledore's. For so many reasons, not all of them selfish.

"– Harry? What's that look on your face?"

Harry shook himself, coming back to the here and now. His eyes refocused on Neville's round face, still flushed from ranting, and he smiled.

"Just thinking about how lucky I am to have a boyfriend like you," he said, stepping forward, and kissed Neville.

And thought of the coming time when their power base would be stable enough, and Dumbledore's and Voldemort's both unstable enough, that the son of prophecy could move openly. When the Wizarding World would be brought to its knees before its new Lord. When everyone who had mocked either of them, thinking it an easy thing to abuse the powerless, would pay and pay and _pay_ for their hubris–

Oh yes.

He was lucky indeed to have someone like Neville on his side.

**Author's Note:**

> ...Now, of course. There's a chance Harry's wrong and he _is_ the Chosen One.
> 
> Doesn't say the Chosen One has to be the _direct_ possessor of The Power The Dark Lord Knows Not, after all. What if the power is Neville Longbottom?
> 
>  
> 
> I'll just leave you wondering, then...


End file.
